Archive Fevers

This chapter reviews several developments in the social sciences and the arts that date back to the 1990s and motivated this study of archives as practice. It refers to Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur as key protagonists that led to the rethinking of the role of archiving as a tool of memory. It also details the emergence of the trend of “archival ethnography,” which witnessed the advent of the archival turn in anthropology. The chapter elaborates how archival scholarship took an empirical turn in the mid-1990s, coinciding with the “archive fever” in the arts and the “archival turn” in anthropology that opened venues for investigating architectural archiving. It explores the realm of architectural practice wherein the computer radically changed working dynamics and led to the practice's own archival turn in the mid-1990s.

Introduction

This chapter looks at the conscious effort by architectural practices to consider archives as the computer entered the world of design practice in the 1980s, of which many architects developed an awareness and concern about their legacy. It talks about offices and large firms that began investing effort in organizing and cataloguing their archives systematically. It also demonstrates a different process that shows how architects keep traces of the recent past, traces of practice, as they increasingly pay attention to the importance of archives. The chapter analyzes the mechanisms of constructing archives and the process of archiving as keys for understanding how historical sources in architecture are established. It examines what it means to be an archivist of architecture, which tends to come from the archivists themselves, rather than from professional architects or researchers interested in the practices of archiving.

Opening the Crates

This chapter mentions Marie Gouret and Alexandre Phaneuf, two technicians with different backgrounds and expertise who work together in the shipping area. It analyzes the specificity of archival objects at the start of their archival trajectory at the Canadian Centre of Architecture (CCA). It also pays close attention to Gouret and Phaneuf's relationships with the objects in order to sketch the specificity of their practices. The chapter explains how objects are often surrounded and comforted by those who look after them and follow them, emphasizing the variety of trajectories of travel between institutions and sites. It talks about the use of photographs, which help recollect ethnographic situations and retain details, atmospheres, and flavors of actions, speeds and rhythms.

A Morning in the Vaults

This chapter provides a better understanding of the changing nature of architectural archives and their vibrant connections to design practice. It embraces reflections on different fragments from fieldwork notes that retain the traces of ontological disturbances experienced in the world of architectural archiving, as well as the comparative dialoguing with the fieldwork of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). It also describes OMA storage boxes, which provides a distinction between the working archives of designers and the archives that go into collecting institutions. The chapter explores the ethnographic similarity experienced and automatically enacted that resonates with the connection between designing and archiving. It investigates the changing nature of architectural archives and their vibrant connections to design practice.

Conclusion

This chapter brings together a number of moves under different collectors that redefine an archive as a heterogeneous and relational aggregate that captures the distributed epistemic nature of an architectural oeuvre. It outlines archival ways of knowing that suggest how architecture can be grasped as a versatile addition of built forms. It also examines a composite understanding of architecture which causes a rethinking of what collections do to history, to architectural knowledge and its institutions. The chapter emphasizes how archiving discovers a history of architectural forms that unfolds as a diagram of active forces to challenge and reactualize the distributed ontological boundaries of buildings. It describes archiving as a semantic machine that continually evolves and develops possible futures for architecture.

Politics of Care

This chapter traces the life of architectural objects at the Canadian Centre of Architecture (CCA) and the conservation lab, which creates the impression of being the most isolated place at the CCA. It describes the objects on trial, experiments in progress, protocols, tests results, a giant microscope, and the lingering smell of unknown chemicals inside the conservation lab. It also emphasizes how objects in the conservation lab are treated like patients in need of special care as the objects get a full health and security check. The chapter analyses reports of each object's experiences and reactions, which allow the objects to be inspected during an exhibition to ensure that they have not changed. It reviews the work of conservators Karen Potje and David Stevenson in order to follow how the affected objects are treated amidst the fear of time and hazards of climates and environments.

Architecture and The “Fever” of Archiving

This chapter looks at recent attempts within the field of architectural scholarship that have shown more awareness of archive formation and the tactics of architectural knowledge making. It discusses archives as practices, as ways of scrambling epistemologies. It also pays ethnographic attention to the daily work and care of professional archivists and conservators, as well as archive-making strategies employed by practicing architects to envisage an archive-based future. The chapter presents an anthropology of archiving that would scrutinize what constitutes an archive in architecture, what form it takes, and what systems of classification and epistemology it performs at specific times.

The Life of an Old Floppy Disk

This chapter distinguishes between the digitization of existing archives and born-digital archives, which can be shown through the Canadian Centre of Architecture's (CCA) varying approaches to them. It explains that digitization is the process of converting information into a computer-readable digital format, in which the outcome is the digital representation of objects, documents, and images. It also mentions Mirko Zardini, who explains that CCA curators and conservators do not consider it reasonable to digitize an entire archive. The chapter shows different challenges for born-digital archives and their preservation that sets new obstacles. It discusses the encounter between the computer, the new design and communication tools it affords, and architectural practice that resulted in a significant change.